Living in one world, preparing for another. Homeschooling through phonograms and amphibians and multiples of four. Prayers go up for the crisis in Goma and the fatherless down the street. The close on our house and the deadline for our support-raising fast approach. Many questions loom, many tasks rise up. But in the midst of a thousand things to do as we look forward at the road ahead, I treasure the coming of this season that begs me to look back… through two thousand years of questions and task lists to the staggering event that puts all the rest of life- all the rest of history- into its proper place. The weight of the incarnation quiets my soul…

Christmas in Unexpected Places (reposted from 12/2/2011)

This morning I had the privilege of spending time with a group of women at a state correctional facility here in Dallas. It was a women’s Bible study made up of about 50 inmates and 20 or so volunteers, and I had been invited to come and lead the group in worship for a few minutes. The facility itself is only a few miles from our house, and it is striking how a place so close geographically can feel so entirely as if it belongs in a different world.

As I entered the building, I handed over my driver’s license, clipped a dirty visitor badge onto my sweater and passed through security, getting buzzed through locked doors and making my way through a maze of dingy corridors up to the unit where the ladies in the Bible study were waiting.

I am always amazed at how we sometimes find Jesus in the most unusual places.

I chatted with one woman in the first few moments as we waited for things to begin. Our conversation was brief but she was very friendly and open, sharing in a matter of minutes everything from how she was glad we were here to how cute she thought my hair was, mentioning also that her daughter is a nude dancer amongst other struggles that have plagued her family for generations.

She stood before me as transparent as anyone ever has no doubt, and I was struck by her badge:

Offender.

Mine said visitor.

I kept rolling those two identities around in my mind as I was there. What a difference letters on a badge make. I thought about how good freedom feels when the reality of prison is as close and tangible as the cement blocks around you. And I thought about how many people would put me and the woman standing in front of me in different camps: Some people are offenders. Some are visitors. Some belong here. Some do not.

And strictly speaking, from a matter of obeying the law, they would be right. Actions have consequences, and my friend is experiencing a consequence for some of her actions. But the weight of law and justice fell very heavy on me this morning. It weighed on me, pushing my mind and heart past something as temporary and transient as a correctional facility in Dallas, Texas to the core truth of humanity:

Before God we all wear a badge that says: offender.

The state of Texas might put me and my friend in different file folders, but the deeper truth is that we both come before the same God with the same drug of sin still pulsing in our veins and the same rebellious ways and the same nature that would prefer the God of the universe take a back seat to the throne from which I’d like to reign over my own life, thank you very much.

This is who we are, she and I. And the unpleasantness of it is palpable for me as I observe the caged existence reserved for offenders.

And then I tell them we are going to sing Joy to the World. And I marvel that it is not Joy to Some. Or Joy to the College Educated without a Criminal Record. It is Joy to Offenders and Joy to Visitors. Because when Jesus was born and heaven broke into the darkness of our world, He came for His sheep… who had ALL gone astray. And I marvel even more that when He came, He came not to write a check and bail us out.

He came to take our offender badge.

And wear it Himself.

Christmas. A baby born under the star of Bethlehem and in the shadow of death row. The righteous for the unrighteous. Holy Visitor for the offender.

God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. – 2 Cor 5:21

In my last post, I wrote about selling our house and the unusually smooth process it has been. We hold it as a gracious gift from the Lord along this journey to move to East Africa. But then a thought occurred to me. A potential miscommunication of sorts. And I felt compelled to clarify something…

Even though selling our house has been an unnaturally smooth process thus far, for which it is easy to give thanks, the whole of our decision and preparation to move to Africa has been not at all smooth… for which we also give thanks, not with ease but by will. We can be prone to see God so quickly when things are tangibly productive according to our sensibilities and conversely to assume that “God must not be in it” when things seem too hard or too complicated. And I just want to say, especially perhaps to those of you following the Lord through circumstances that are not “unnaturally smooth” but instead laborious and overwhelming, God is in that too. Sometimes following God is hard. Very hard. In fact, consider just about every single person in Scripture called by God to do anything. When did He ever appear to anyone and ask them to do something easy? Yes, there are those moments of divine intervention, but even for the great men of faith in Scripture, it was hard. One of the most striking passages to me in all of the Bible is in 1 Kings 19, where Elijah “came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had enough, Lord,’ he said. ‘Take my life…'” He had just called down fire from heaven. God had adjusted His weather patterns for three and a half years according to the prayers of this man. But even Elijah had times that seemed so rough that he thought he couldn’t take it anymore.

Or consider the apostle Paul. Yes, the man learned the secret of joy in all things, but joy in all things did not equal smooth sailing. Following Christ was also times of “great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life.” And his obstacles and trials were not evidence that he was off track or that ‘God wasn’t in it”; rather he explains, “this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God.”

I say all this because we have a culture obsessed with safety, comfort and convenience and it is alarming how great a role we allow those things to play in our lives as believers. We can talk each other out of just about anything risky in the name of “wisdom”. We prefer areas of service that allow us to “operate in our strength zones” in the name of spiritual gifts and can grow to assume that God wouldn’t ever ask us to do anything we wouldn’t want to because He has other people “with a heart” for those kinds of things.

I wonder what Jonah would think of that reasoning.

I don’t mean to paint a bleak picture of the Christian life. On the contrary, I mean to hold out an alternative to the small picture of the Christian life in which we mostly do only things we like and are good at that go smoothly and are manageable, for which we can see positive results that we can measure and feel good about. We can be much quicker to hold out a list of practical concerns than we are to offer courage to each other to attempt impossible things for the sake of the gospel. And we can be so easily disheartened when the road is rough and the waters deep.

So for those of you celebrating a mountain moved by the providential hand of God, I rejoice with you like crazy. For those of you who will not have a mountain moved today, but will experience the providential hand of God giving you the strength to climb one more step up, may you be filled with the joy and faith that God is building you and accomplishing His purposes with each step, however small. And for those of you who have quiet dreams of big things for the sake of the gospel that are being drowned out by the pragmatic strategies of common sense that masquerade as true wisdom- true wisdom that begins not with human sensibilities but the fear of God… may you be ever discontent with a path that is walkable by human ability, may you be willing to labor day after day on roads smooth and rough with all the strength He gives. May you have the conviction of Noah, the perseverance of Moses, the courage of David, the focus of Daniel, the resolve of Nehemiah… all of whom labored and battled to fulfill God’s call on their lives against all common sense. May you have just enough mountains moved to sustain your faith and refresh your soul and not so many that you lose your taste for climbing. And may we all live as if we believe all authority in heaven and earth belongs to the One we follow, who sends us out and promises that He is with us. Always.

-post by Sarah Stehlik, 10/11/2012

It starts and ends here: the child asks me a question.

“Mommy, can you come to Friday chapel today?” my six year old says. I tell him that I would love to do it another time but that I can’t today.

“Oh. Are you going to jail?” he asks.

“Yes,” I tell him.

And I spend the morning visiting and worshiping with the group of women I wrote about back here.

I listen to their small group discussion over the Bible lesson. It’s the rich young ruler we discuss, and we all at that metal table find our likeness somewhere in his shoes… wanting to hold onto Jesus and something else too… willing to fall on our knees and cry “You are good” yet not quite believing He’s good enough to leave everything for. We contemplate the young man’s response to Christ’s recitation of the law. He says, “I have kept all these since I was a boy.” I read his words and my heart says, “Bull. You have not. I know that game. That false sense of satisfactory performance. As if the sinful human who has truly lived under the law would have the audacity to stand over the law and say ‘done’.” The rich young ruler speaks my native language and it is pride, and I am on to him because I was him.

Then one of the inmates reads her own words scrawled in her workbook. She has not lived under any delusion of self-righteousness. Not for a long time. She knows her unworthiness. And the tears that redden her eyes as she shares her gratitude for God’s grace bring to mind Jesus’ words to the religious leaders in Matthew 21:31 “…The tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

Literally.

Nonetheless, the women I sit with at that table are living with very challenging realities… lives marked with sure consequences, some of which will remain with them for the remainder of their time on this earth. And as I look around at each of them I think how might your life had been different had you started walking with Christ twenty years ago? If someone had intervened when you were…

It is the previous afternoon and I am at Edison Middle School… which is very different from my recollections of junior high. For instance, none of my friends had probation officers. Nor did we have full time police officers patrolling our campus. None of my classmates ever spent the day running up and down the hall screaming profanities, taunting the authorities to “come and get him” and then hiding all over the place until finally apprehended by the cops. We were real small town like that.

One of the older students wanders the hall past my perch at the welcome desk, and I ask him where he’s supposed to be. He mumbles that he walked out of so and so’s class because she threw a book at him and hit him upside the head and now his head hurts. I smile and tell him to get back to class and stop giving his teacher reasons to throw things at him. He smiles, knowing that he has not fooled me with his innocence but complains again that his head hurts. I shake my head, tell him I’m pretty sure he can handle himself and urge him to go learn just one thing. “Just one thing,” I plead with him, “You can do that.” And to my surprise he nods and goes.

Maybe.

It was a hard afternoon honestly. Hard to see the power of grace through so much broken. So. Much. Broken. The parade of f-bombs past my desk as the kids change classes makes me sit there and think how do you get this hard by middle school? How are things this broken this early in life? And even before…

It is hours earlier in the morning when I am at Carver Elementary to work with my kindergartners, trying in meager minutes to make up gaps that are already widening and stretching like a canyon between them and a future of hope and fullness. I walk into the class with all those little bodies hopping around. Like fleas.

Really. They are 70% human, 30% flea at that age.

Their teacher, who is also part angel, welcomes me with her beautiful gray hair and tired smile. “I don’t know if I’m gonna make it, Sarah,” she says with a laugh. And amid the sea of hugs that the little crowd of flea-humans come to give, one little girl calls to me. She is tiny, and she is the one I wrote about here. And the child asks me a question:

Are you still praying for me???

Yes, sweetheart. I am praying like mad. Like a person with eyes wide open to what might so easily lie ahead for you and wide open to the so much better– so much better– that might otherwise lie ahead for you. I am praying like mad.